Samhain Lord of the Dead

Tired of my many Halloween posts recently? I promise I'm almost done! This last one and I'll have gotten it out of my system ...for now.

In a recent post, "The Plain Truth About Samhain", we opened up the historical record and we dug in to find what it says, or more likely does not say, about Samhain. It was clear Samhain was a calendar event. Of course there's so much more to the story than one post can handle.

In the mid-1900s, there was another popular explanation for Samhain - that Samhain was a proper noun name of an ancient Druidic god titled "Lord of the Dead".
Woo! Spooky!
I avoided talking about this because it is complete and utter nonsense. I said I'd get to this later. Here we are! I want to go over this because the claim was quite popular when I was a kid. Something everyone needed to know. Promoted in the Plain Truth Magazine as God's own truth. Celebrating on Halloween was worshipping a demon lord! Even though few repeat this any more, it still has ramifications to this day. The damage was done. So, now I want to know where it came from. I find it interesting because of who was involved. Long-time readers of this blog, all two of you, will recognize some of these names.

Let's start at the end of the story, because that's the best part.

1950s ONWARD

Samhain Lord of the Dead (or similar phrases) was very popular in the Worldwide Church of God and its splinter churches from the 1950s through recently. The earliest written record I could find is in a Plain Truth article by Herman Hoeh from 1953.

“'The American celebration rests upon Scottish and Irish folk customs WHICH CAN BE TRACED IN DIRECT LINE FROM PRE-CHRISTIAN TIMES' - from paganism! 'Although Halloween has become a night of rollicking fun, superstitious spells, and eerie games which people take only half seriously, its beginnings were quite otherwise. The earliest Halloween celebrations were held' -not by the inspired early church, but-- 'by the Druids in honor of Samhain, Lord of the Dead, whose festival fell on November 1.'” (From Halloween Through Twenty Centuries, by Ralph Linton, p. 4.)

-Herman Hoeh, "Halloween Where Did It Come From?", The Plain Truth magazine, October 1953, p.7 [bold mine]

Given what we learned in my other Halloween posts, we can see several things are wrong there. Read the posts and you'll see. But the biggest thing for use right now is that Samhain is and always was a day; never a being.

Herman Hoeh, "most accurately informed historian in the world" right there. Almost accurately, anyway.

I'll believe anything you say! Just don't eat me!

The Worldwide Church of God ran basically the same article in The Plain Truth magazine through the 60s, changed it slightly in the 70s when John Schroeder retooled it (see the October 1975 edition), and was still making this claim as late as 1985 (see the Good News magazine, October/November 1985, p.11 - this is the famous edition with the giant, scary, red triceratops that captivated many an active imagination.) Philadelphia COG was still writing articles with this claim in 2021.

Here's the real kicker. As it turns out, the Worldwide Church of God in general and Herman Hoeh in particular were at the forefront of this claim. The spearhead, so to speak. Who knew all of us with a past in Armstrongism were part of something instrumental in spreading the Samhain Lord of the Dead misinformation. If you are or were an Armstrongist, you can hold your head high knowing you were part of a group that promoted one of the stupidest things ever written.

Herman Hoeh and his source material helped to inspire many others outside of Armstrongism. One notable name that promoted the claim was Jack Chick (cartoonist and evangelist). He wrote several "Chick Tracts" attacking Halloween from the 1960s to early 80s. Because of this, many on the fringe of Evangelical Christianity heeded the entirely false information about Samhain.
Another source was Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (see volume 12, 1973, p.152). How can Jack Chick be wrong if it was in the encyclopedia? The encyclopedia entry was so thoroughly bad, I literally LOL'd as I read it.
Some claim Ralph Woodrow as a source, but I cannot find anything of the sort, nor can I find anything from Alexander Hislop. Others claim Mike Warnke - the guy who was exposed as a fraud for starting the Satanist panic of the 1980s - but I could not verify this either.

By the 1980s, the claim had become so widespread it started leaking into pop culture. For example, the movie Halloween II mentioned it, then Halloween III mentions it in a more roundabout way. Slasher films would never mislead us, would they? And the infamous punk rocker Glen Danzig named his second band after Samhain. Well, he's back touring with the Misfits now, so no harm done.

I have found some fringe names online who have made this claim more recently. Plus, older publications a plenty are available online right now with this claim lingering inside like an old smell in a cellar, so I suppose that counts as the claim still being made today. I mean, they could take it down or even add some kind of retraction. But no.

It's wonderful to be in such good company as this.

In short, the sources are very few and the quality of the claims are on par with Alexander Hislop's.

It was never true! I mean, yeah, it's "God's truth", sure. But it's not true truth. That's my point.
(If you are new to this blog, I am being sarcastic here, due to the multitudinous false claims Armstrongism has labeled "God's truth" over the years. We have articles on that.)

PRIOR TO 1950s

We've seen the end of the story, now let's see the beginning.
How did Herman Hoeh and Funk & Wagnalls get so wrong in the first place? Let's find out.

When Ronald Hutton, in his book "Blood and Mistletoe", moves into his section on Early Modern authors, William Stukeley is the first name he mentions.

Stukeley never used the phrase "Samhain Lord of the Dead" or anything similar. But what he did was (falsely) linked the Druids to cultures in the ancient Middle East. Stukeley claimed the Druids were practitioners of a pure, universal ancient religion. He believed most of the world abandoned that religion and devolved into idolatry, but the Druids did not. In his view, Druids were wise and benevolent, with incredible wisdom and skill equal to ancient Egyptians and Greeks in every way. The only people better than the Druids were the Israelites, and only because of divine revelation.

You might ask, what does that have to do with anything? Excellent question. It lays the groundwork for other "historians" to concoct new ideas tying the Celts to practices from the ancient near east; treating them interchangeably. One person in particular who accepted this was Charles Vallancey.

In 1786, Vallancey published the book "A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland" where he lays out his case. He associated Samhain with Baal and Bacchus, and calls Samhain "angel of death" and "judge of departed souls" (see pp.230-232 and 494-495 of that link).
Like a literary force of nature, while writing Vindication, Vallancey was also writing a multi-volume series of books titled "Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis". In volume III, he links Samhain with Baal and Pluto, uses the phrase "judge of departed souls" again, and even invents a whole new name: Balsab, by combining Baal (a Canaanite word meaning "lord") and Sab (a made up word he says means "death") (see pp.443-448 of that link). Now, for the first time, we have the Lord of death idea fully formed. And, as anyone who knows their Bible will realize, he has matched Samhain to the Devil.

As author Lisa Morton said in her book "Trick or Treat: A history of Halloween":

"There was just one problem: much of what Vallancey recorded was wrong." (p.9).

This is the guy who started it all. He's the one who turned Samhain from a day into a being and then into the lord of death.
Since I write about holidays too often I need to clear something up before it ever arises. Vallancey is not personifying the day. He is creating brand-new mythology and plugging it into real history. In his version of history, the day would eventually take its name from this being he invented.

If you are thinking this sounds a lot like Alexander Hislop and J. H. Allen, you're absolutely right. Birds of a feather, they are all products of the ideas of the 1500s to 1800s - shockingly bad etymology where any words that sound similar are similar, ancient one-world religions, interchangeable gods where almost all are one and the same, eastern nations populating Britain, customs specific to one culture could simply be applied to any other culture at will, and whatever pops into your mind gets printed as if it was God's own truth - no brain/pen filter at all. Exactly like Hislop, Allen, Hoeh, Collins, and etc etc. This is why you need to be very careful with information from this era. This is precisely why I dedicated a whole section to material from this era in my Samhain post. This is the main point of my post "Some Background On Hislop".

Vallancey was strongly opposed by scholars such as Sir William Jones (father of Comparative Linguistics and author of multiple books on Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit), Edward O'Reilley (author Irish-English Dictionary), and others. Some of the criticism was brutal. For example, Leslie Stephen, in his Dictionary of National Biography, wrote:

"Vallancey may be regarded as the founder of a school of writers who theorise on Irish history, language, and literature, without having read the original chronicles, acquired the language, or studied the literature, and who have had some influence in retarding real studies, but have added nothing to knowledge." (p.83).

Ouch!

But it is clear that his distortions found an audience. As P.T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute." Sadly, one such was James Bonwick, author of "Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions" (1894).

Bonwick used Vallancey's Vindication as a source and repeated his mistakes. There were a handful of other authors at the turn of the 20th century who reworked these claims, but none of any great import.

In the mid-20th century, Ralph Linton picks up the gauntlet and writes the book which introduces Herman Hoeh to the idea of "Samhain Lord of the Dead.” It seems Herman Hoeh relied exclusively on Linton.

I actually took the time to order Linton's book on intra-library loan just so I could see who he cites as his sources. He cites no one.

Oddly enough, Linton's book is recommended on Encyclopedia.com as, "An excellent account of Halloween, its evolution throughout the centuries, and how it is related to the Christian cult of the dead." (Hugo Nutini "Day of the Dead", https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/day-dead.)
Never you mind those glaring falsehoods and lack of citation!

I tried to hunt down where Linton may have gotten his claims (because that's what we do here at As Bereans Did). Was it directly from Vallancey, or indirectly through another author like Bonwick? Unfortunately, nothing was apparent. One possible candidate is author Ruth Edna Kelley and her book "The Book of Hallowe'en" (1919). And whom does she obviously draw from? Charles Vallancey. Vallancey is not cited as a source (it seems she pulled more from magazines than scholarly sources), but the concepts she writes about (ie. judging the dead, fortuitous timing of All Saints) are obviously his and the language she uses ("lord of death") is his.

It all starts with and returns back to Vallancey.

That takes us right Back to the Future, to the 1950s and later, where Herman Hoeh will spread this mind virus to the world like a virulent, swirling plague of sheer uneducated ignorance, all because he was too dedicated to his own pre-determined conclusions to bother verifying his source material. It sounded too good to pass up.
But Hoeh was paid to be a fanatic - what's Funk & Wagnall's excuse?

CONCLUSION

Stukeley tied Druids to the Near East, which inspired Vallancey to personify Samhain and pair him with Satan, James Bonwick borrows and degrades Vallancey's ideas with even more horrific etymology, Linton (and some others) pick this up and put some lipstick on it, which was read by Hoeh, and it all somehow made it into Chick Tracks, the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia, and Halloween II.

That's how it happened!

So, what is the big lesson here?     Mind. Your. Sources.
How few and unreliable were the sources used to build one of the most popular claims about Samhain. Is it really a surprise that it was false?

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It is important that you understand; Everything on this blog is based on the current understanding of each author. Never take anyone's word for it, always prove it for yourself, it is your responsibility. You cannot ride someone else's coattail into the Kingdom. ; )

Acts 17:11

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